They are likely to fail because they are under capitalized for what they are trying to do.<p>The manufacturing processes to produce a decent phone are fiendishly complex. The cost of equipment to do basic quality assurance of the hardware stretch into the millions of dollars.<p>If (and it's a HUGE if) they are able to ship, it's because they will have put all their trust into their manufacturer, and the manufacturer that built the product for them delivered.<p>> One of the big tasks of our software and design teams, working with our partners (GNOME, KDE, Matrix, Nextcloud, and Monero), will be to create a proper User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) for a phone screen.<p>No it's not. They should lay off all those people and spend all the money on QA / testing hw iterations. The strategy should be to try to spend the $2M as miserly as possible, until they have something that looks like a phone and passes a crapload of software QA tests. For what they have and because their prospects of raising vc cash are dim, burning 150K/month on ui & framework building is not a good strategy.